I wonder if this is a bit more publicity than gwern bargained for.

Maybe you are now going to read the scripture from our lord Kahneman as prescribed by Yudkowsky his prophet (ahem).

Original paper: http://www.hss.caltech.edu/~camerer/Ec101/JudgementUncertainty.pdf

Amazon: http://www.amazon.de/Judgment-under-Uncertainty-Heuristics-Biases/dp/0521284147

I took the survey, and did all of the extra credit work too!

That IQ test seemed really silly, but I've never taken one before, so who knows?

I've had several "breakthroughs" recently in my long-term personal effectiveness/organization project.

GTD

I became aware of GTD well over a year ago, and put a tremendous amount of time and energy into implementing GTD through Emacs org-mode. This was a total failure, costing me not only the time I invested in it, but also intangible losses from missed deadlines, forgotten meetings and misfiled notes. I suppose perhaps I "wasn't doing it right," but I give org-mode a pretty honest go, and ultimately was severely let down.

Later, I tried to implement GTD through Evernote, but this did not work very well, despite the fact that I had already been using Evernote for a long time as a general note-taking app. If I may pontificate for a moment, I have come to believe that GTD only really works if certain fundamental aspects of the process can be made extremely relieable and easy to use/access. I will attempt to list these here:

• Putting a new item in your action Inbox should take no more than 10 seconds, no matter where you are (phone, computer, home, work). If it takes much more than this, you will think of a reason why your current thought isn't important enough to make a note of.

• Sorting items from the Inbox into their appropriate Project/Context should be not only fast but also error-proof. I don't want to totally lose a note because I forgot the exact character string for a certain project tag. I don't want to even feel like that is a possibility.

• When I have finished an action item, I need it to Go Away, i.e. I don't want to see it anymore, but I want to trust that it has been stored in the right place for future reference. Again, I don't even want to have to wonder if it went to the right place.

• All this leads to: You have to actually trust the system. Much is made of having a "trusted system" in the GTD literature but this is one of those things that you don't really understand until it personally hits home for you. I think org-mode never worked for me partially because I never trusted it, and I never trusted it because it wasn't clean and fault-tolerant.

I eventually discovered Nozbe and it's taken me roughly six months to get to a place where I trust it, and where it really does what GTD is supposed to do. (Nozbe is, I guess, a cloud-based implementation of GTD, with a seamlessly synching iPhone/Android, computer, and web app. Nozbe handles all the bullet points I describe above - in fact, it's only through using Nozbe that I realized those were the features that I was missing.)

One of my breakthroughs was the realization that "getting organized" is a process, not a decision. Historically, I have been prone to reasoning of the following nature:

"It makes sense to me that once I start using this complicated productivity tool which builds a Gantt chart for my activities, I will understand what my most urgent priorities are and thus I will work on them."

What I didn't grasp what that the previous sentence is a psychological hypothesis about myself, not a fact, but I acted as though it was a fact, and became dissappointed - "The system failed me" / "I failed the system", rather than, "That was never actually a good idea, but it's good that I proved that through trial."

Getting organized is a process that necessarily must be spread out over a long period of time. It is unavoidable, because you can't implement an organizational scheme until things start happening in your life. You have to view your organizational scheme as an evolving entity which grows and learns as you encounter new types of projects, new types of necessary action, and new structural challenges. You have to iterate and experiment and come up with a personal solution. "Based on the last month, I notice that this system really helps me remember to return phone calls, but doesn't help me remember to do recurring daily tasks - daily tasks just clutter everything up and my eyes just sweep over them. I didn't expect that, a priori. What if I remove all the daily recurring tasks?" Ultimately, it feels like the reason org-mode didn't work for me is that org-mode is somebody else's personal solution. It's like wearing somebody else's carefully tailored suit. It doesn't fit me.

Checklists

Another core aspect of my current scheme is the use of checklists. Every day, when I get in to work, I (try to) immediately start a journal entry in Evernote, into which I copy the following checklist (taking advantage of Evernote checkboxes):

[ ]Start journal entry first thing in the morning [ ]Review Nozbe [ ]Clean cognitive plate for first task [ ]Open/locate relevant files [ ]Outline current task/project structure

I automatically "win" the first checkbox just by the act of starting the journal entry which contains this checklist, so I immediately have forward momentum. The next item is to review my Nozbe to-do list. That's right - my first daily task is basically a "pointer" forcing me to actually reference my real organizational system and thereby recall what I'm supposed to be doing.

The third checkbox, well, that's one of those things that I added in the course of trial and error. The fourth seems like a no-brainer, but again, this is exactly the type of thing that checklists are for. "Why am I having such a hard time getting started today? Oh, I my brain is trying to remember what input/code file is relevant to this problem while simultaneously coding/writing something else entirely. Maybe I should get all the files open as one discrete step?" The last checkbox I only do if I'm starting something new, but again, it's a "no brainer" which you can waste a whole day managing to not do, if you haven't provided it to yourself as a discrete option.

On top of having thechecklist, it's useful to have a timestamped journal entry associated with every day, a catchall for what I am thinking about, in a place where I know I will remember to look later. This is literally the first time in my life I've managed to keep a journal of any kind, and I think the reason is that I've built this checklist-mechanism into it.

On top of all this, whenever I make improvements to a code or some document, I put the latest version in a Dropbox folder named with today's date. I'm sure I'd be better off using a real version control system, and I'll probably get around to it in time, but on the other hand, I can use this method for any type of file.

I've been meaning to write all this up for some time. I hope it's useful to others to watch someone else's struggles.

If you could specially mark interbook links and internet links so that they're visually different, that'd be nice. I'm working my way through an unofficial epub of the sequences, and I'm never sure if the blue link will take me to another chapter, or open the browser and ruin my reading experience.

Warning

Obligatory link

More compactly this is called "Hitler Ate Sugar".

I don't have much time to think on this right now, but perhaps an Anti-Godwin's law could be useful? Something along the lines of "just because your opponent made a simplistic analogy to Nazism, it does not follow that their overall argument is wrong".

But what needs to be done? Maybe what needs to be done requires three times your life savings, and you must produce it or fail.

The whole post, I kept thinking, "But what's the difference? What's it actually look like?" And then I got to this line, and it crystallized. Brutal.